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Let me apologise now I've simmered down, to the vast majority of people reading this who are neither lazy, arrogant or complacent.

I have disability myself, and my ire was raised at being told I'm not normal, should not have had the money wasted on educating me to get a first class degree, that the internet is not for me, and the like.

I'm lucky to have a good income, and I spend a lot of it online. All my xmas presents, groceries for a family of four, all my books, music, an iPod. And I can't buy it from you if you won't let me resize your text or force me to click on tiny (or moving) targets with a mouse.

Unless you're doing something really evil, like offering internet-only discounts but locking me out, I won't email you and tell you, because you either don't respond, or sound like many in this thread and don't want my money anyway.

That's your choice and I congratulate you on having a business (or clients so rich) that you can afford to turn my money down. But if you'd post the secret of how you got so rich you can afford to ignore 10% of the population, I'm sure we'd all be fascinated to read it.

If this lawsuit is sucessful, will EVERY Print media then be the target of visually imparied person - will Newspapers have to offer a MP3 version of what is printed for the visually impaired, what, they want a free MP3 player as well and only want to pay a buck for it as well - excuse me for being insensitive and cynical.

I have never seen a city newspaper that doesn't offer both large print and braille editions. Even lots of small community papers do because they have a lot of older readers. Stop arguing this strawman, because most other media already are accessible.

Ive just never seen a screen-reader which can look at flash effectively.

why isnt the f**cker suing Adobe?

Complaints were leveled at Adobe for quite some time by usability experts.
Eventually they took the advice and improved the current version to make it more accessible, especially when used as a menu system. Wonder what made them decide to change it...

Again, if it isn't accessible, it is reducing the number of sales for the company, so any sensible company would try to make it more accessible.

As for these idiotic comments about should blind people be able to drive, while I'm not totally familiar with the wording in the US laws, in the UK laws the phrase used is "reasonable adjustments" and clearly adjusting a car to be driven by a blind person is not reasonable. That also goes for many of the other remarks along the same lines. Clearly including ALT text IS a reasonable adjustment, or do you not know how to do that? Fixed size text will discriminate against many people, the old in particular who generally have poorer eyesight and can improve things by altering the size via the browser. You may have noticed that most good web sites don't use fixed size text. Ever wondered why?....

You need to check your spelling doc... but also... do you really think this guy just wanted them to fix the site? Come on, don't be obtuse, why wouldn't target comply if that is all he wanted? He was blackmailing them, and they wouldn't pay up.

The NFB wrote to Target in May, asking it to make the site more accessible, according to the plaintiffs. Negotiations broke down in January, which led to the filing of the lawsuit, the organization said.

Is making personal attacks on someone's spelling and accusing a stranger of blackmail without any proof what-so-ever the sort of posting we should expect from Team Leaders now?

Oh and aspen, it should be Target not target :P

Octal - All your base-8 belong to us"Knowing is not enough, we must apply.
Willing is not enough, we must do." - Bruce Lee

Fixed size text will also discriminate against people with high resolution monitors like me. If I can't increase the text size (without the site breaking into pieces) then I go somewhere else. Most sites, probably trying to save space to serve too much information to visitors , have very very small default font size and I really hate that. People who have good computers shouldn't be discriminated against!

"I disapprove of what I say,
but I will defend to the death my right to say it."

Well yeah, that's pretty much it. Many blind people use programs that will read what's on screen out loud and navigate with keyboard shortcuts.

Of course, that's just one way to do it as well. Some people while legally blind can actually still see a little and they can get by with using a high-contrast color scheme and extra large fonts on their computer. These people may not need a screen reader, but they do need to use websites that allow for flexible text sizing.

I find many of the comments in this post both offensive and downright stupid.

I guess that if blind people shouldn't use the internet, I should close down my business, turn off the PC and give up everything I worked though college to obtain-- oh wait, blind people probably shouldn't have fine art degrees, either. It's funny how vocational rehab never made me aware of this when they were paying my college tuition, buying me the assistive technology I needed to do my work and giving me a start-up grant to get my company off the ground (not just hand-outs, I earned them with good grades hard work and effort, thanks).

It must be possible, because I've been successful enough at it to no longer need or qualify for their services.

News flash: There isn't much we can't do, but we sometimes need a little help along the way to do it. We have just as much right to crosswalk singals that beep as you do to ones that blink, etc. We don't have the *right* to do everything exactly as sighted people do. That's not a question of rights, that's a question of what is and isn't physically possible. What we have the right to is the reasonable alternative.

I'm not totally blind, but I am legally so. I have no visioin in my left eye and the vision in my right eye is greatly reduced. I require assistive technology to use a computer, to see things at a distance and so on.

Sometimes being able to "access" everything I need and want to is my responsibility. Sometimes that adjustments that I need made in order to see/do something don't fall within what is reasonable to expect others to provide for me. I'm fine with that. I know I have limitations and I find ways to work around them.

I won't say that I expect other people to cater to my needs, because I don't (with a few exceptions, schools, government), but we should be able to meet half-way. I have the right to ask for and receive help.

So if a company refuses to make their website accessible to a blind person, particularly when state law requires them to, does the blind person have the right to sue? Yes. Yes, he does. The suing for damages bit, I'm not so sure about. To me that sounds a bit greedy, not something I would do, but on principle, I agree with him. Saying he "could have gone to the store" doesn't matter. It's far easier to go online than it is to physically go to the store, because, as so many of you have already pointed out, blind people don't drive. Oddly enough, though, we also don't expect Target to provide transportation to and from their retail locations.

As for these idiotic comments about should blind people be able to drive, while I'm not totally familiar with the wording in the US laws, in the UK laws the phrase used is "reasonable adjustments" and clearly adjusting a car to be driven by a blind person is not reasonable.

I think -- in this case -- 15mph speed restriction should be considered a "reasonable adjustment".

This is a perfect example of a law beeing pushed too far. There should be websites made for blind people where they sell goods I guess, but getting every site to comply with this would be a great waste of human ressources, time and money.

This is a perfect example of a law beeing pushed too far. There should be websites made for blind people where they sell goods I guess, but getting every site to comply with this would be a great waste of human ressources, time and money.

I can fully understand it in the case of publicly funded groups (states, govenements etc) to provide access to those who fund them (everyone paying taxes directly or indirectly). You're paying for a service, you should get that service.

I'm a little unsure how that basis extends to the private sector ("Everybody should be able to pay for your service"), though it has been (or is being, much the same) passed into law.

This is a perfect example of a law beeing pushed too far. There should be websites made for blind people where they sell goods I guess, but getting every site to comply with this would be a great waste of human ressources, time and money.

1) Making a site accessible is fairly easy to do.

2) Excluding a portion of your potential customer base because of laziness or ignorance is bad business. Period.

2) Excluding a portion of your potential customer base because of laziness or ignorance is bad business. Period.

1) True

2) True, but it doesn't explain why we should legislate good business practice. (Shouldn't companies be allowed to fail? Isn't that what markets are for?) In the general case, we can't expect the government to know the "best" way to run a business, it isn't one after all. I've not seen any evidence that these laws were passed due to big business lobbying, so I think it would be wrong to cite business reasons as a primary motivator.

First I am very disappointed in the way many members are debating this subject (including some wearing badges). This thread has become a poster child for bad and at times offensive debating tactics (from both sides of the issue).

Now, to the subject of the matter; I personally fault the developers of Target's site more than Target. So many accessibility issues could so easily be addressed by simply using better coding practices. This almost goes back to the old debates about making websites cross browser friendly. So many accessibility issues could be resolved by simply making proper use of W3C HTML & CSS specifications. Why is it that a development team as expensive as those hired by the likes of Amazon and Target can not write valid HTML and CSS?

From the articles I've read, Target's accessibility problem isn't complicated. It boils down to very simple bad development techniques that should have been abandoned years ago. For instance, they weren't using alt= in images. How hard is it to provide logical alternative text? On their site blind users could not be related items to their prices. How hard is it to create a logical schematic page structure that plain text browsers could understand while using CSS to control pay layout for users who can see? Forms could not be submitted without clicking with a mouse. I can see and I can use a mouse, but I still hate forms like this. Is it so hard to use a "real" submit button?

Folks, this is 2006 not 1996. As web developers/designers we should be making conscious efforts to write code that validates to W3C HTML and CSS specifications and to make proper use of document structure. There is no rational excuse for using scores of nested tables to control document layout and there is no excuse not to consider the most basic usability issues.

Not every site will be 100% accessible, but there is no excuse for us not to write valid code and there is no excuse for professional developers not fully understanding how to properly structure a document making proper use of HTML tags. If a "developer" can't write HTML code from a text editor and can't understand what a HTML file is trying to do by simply looking at the source code, maybe it is time for them to get new jobs.

Target's problem exists because some developer was too lazy to be bothered with doing their job properly and responsibly.

If you want a tool that will help you make your sites more accessible, find and download Lynx. It is a text only browser that will show you just how usable your site is if JavaScript, CSS and tables are not supported.

Now with that said, I do not think it is our responsibility to bend over backward to fix every last detail on a site to make it 100% perfectly accessible to every single user. Those with disabilities do have a responsibility to step up to the plate and make use of tools that make the web more accessible to them. If you need to see larger text, don't buy a 15" monitor and set it to 1280x1024, buy a 19" or 21" monitor and set it to 800x600.

Those that market accessibility products to the disabled also have a responsibility in these matters. For instance, I constantly see comments about fixed sized text. I am a firm believer that this is an issue for the provider of accessibility tools not website developers. For example, AFAIK, Opera is the only browser to get zooming correct. If the text of my pages need to be bigger, then everything needs to be bigger not just the text as the graphics are as important as the text when I use them. Now many of the accessibility "purists" here will disagree with me on the text sizing issue and that is fine, we'll have to just agree to disagree.

==Edit==
I just read on Microsoft's IEBlog that IE7 will zoom the same way as Opera. I think this will force Firefox to follow Opera's lead on this issue, which will eliminate the px vs. em issue once and for all.